Photographed by Eden Batki at Stanford University.

Architects have been trying to impress David Neuman for years. As University Architect at Stanford since 1989, and at the University of California, Irvine before that, Neuman has overseen more than 5 billion dollars in campus construction, collaborating with the likes of Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock, and Ricardo Legorreta, all the while keeping a close eye on the university’s historic fabric and an ear to its contemporary politics. This month, Neuman moves to the University of Virginia, where in addition to facilities planning and new design projects, he takes on responsibility for that ultimate slice of American campus—Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village.

Q: You’ve been doing this for 25 years. How have you come to see the role of a campus architect?

I’m constantly absorbing the nature of the university itself—not simply its mission, but its qualities andits characteristics, and its emphases at a given time—and interpreting those into a variety of physical plans and projects. Because in my mind every project has a responsibility for creating a campus, just as I think in good urban planning every project has to do with making a better city. I’ve always said, we are building a campus, but every building is campus-building—with building as a verb. I subscribe to what [architectural historian and Stanford professor Paul V.] Turner said in this whole dialogue of “what is the campus?”: It’s a confined green space, a planned landscape that’s utopian, that has some sort of unique qualitythat’s ideal.

So even when you’re thinking about commissioning individual buildings, like the recently completed Clark Center by Norman Foster, the campus as a whole has to be more than an architectural petting zoo?

Oh yeah, it has to, because collecting individual icons isn’t campus-building. The Clark center to me is such an incredible building because it recognizes plan and landscape at least as much as the architecture. That said, certain buildings, like the main quad at Stanford or Memorial Church, take on an iconographic role. Even university planning journals are using the term “branding” all over the place. But I think it’s the spaces and the plan and the relationship that create something like an urban fabric, where you can put in and take out pieces and change them around, but the overall sense of the place will stay the same because the landscape and the plan—the ordering, if you will—will be here.

Has your notion of what’s appropriate to the campus’s historic fabric changed over the years?

The biggest shift in my mind—and this has something to do with Stanford, but obviously it has to do with the world environment—is that things are much more transitory, even in the campus. We used to have this expression, “We’re building for the next century.” It’s been replaced with, “We’re building for 30 to 50 years.” Because, really, it’s the plan and the landscape that are going to be here a lot longer in terms of ordering whatever will come—although the architecture is what people talk about.